mikes

We had the labels that peel off in tiny "square" fragments but over time (about 2 months) the kids will peel most of them off. It is a habit thing, when you are bored at a computer, you pick and fiddle with labels; a month or two of this and the label is gone. Putting labels on the back worked better, but that isn't good as they are not easily visible at a glance. I didn't find a solution to this, what I ended up doing was permanently modifying the cases with Dymo labels, and using that superglue with a brush applicator and applying a thin layer of superglue over the top of the dymo label; this stopped the labels coming off for about 5 years. Then if we changed rooms we just superglued a new label on top of the old one. Not sure how Lenovo would have reacted if I had to send one back for warranty repairs though.

yeah maybe there might be a generic driver if you can find out who actually manufactured the hardware? sometimes these firms just repackage other vendors optics into a gaudy blue plastic case. I haven't seen a digiblue device in 10 years. It'd be like hunting down 64bit drivers for an old inkjet printer, a wild goose chase.

I also went with the default location, I was worried if I changed it, it might break something. A lot of poorly written pap has hardcoded installation strings buried in the executable. It is working for us, with AppLocker I had to use %osdrive%\users\etc instead of c:\ as it wouldn't pick it up otherwise; not sure why this happened. I just whitelisted the path. Didn't do the .exe hash if it is going to update. I didn't need to change any of our Impero settings though I excempted the install dir from Forefront's scans. I deployed the MSI straight using SCCM, using the silent install flag specified on the WJEC website. (they didn't use /q like everyone else, they had to pick their own...) We have a transparent proxy so didn't need to worry about that. I just made a specific ETEST user, log on as that and run the client. We sucessfully ran a mock exam. The pupils were confused at one point, as it had sound (we had no headphones) - the question showed a rectangular box with a still of someones face. The pupils weren't aware there was sound. There was a button to the right labelled "transcript" that had a transcript, but some of the pupils don't know what that word means (they were not set 1 english). Why didn't they just have this text there in the first place? Our live exam is 9am tomorrow. Will see how it goes... Honestly I think paper exams are still better. There is much less to go wrong. The teacher of this subject actually specified this exam be done on the computer; he said the students work better on computer (??). I wish he'd had asked for my opinion beforehand but nobody really does that here anyway.

We were having trouble logging onto the Surpass Admin website. It kept denying our username/password. At first I thought it was the staff member but it kept denying two of our staff members, then eventually let us in after about 10 minutes. Has anyone else had problems logging in? Also we had problems with the Surpass Admin complaining about Adobe Flash being out of date; but the actual Surpass Secure Client did let us run a mock exam. An annoyance is that it required sound (though a transcript was provided). Nowhere was it communicated that we would need sound for these exams? The first I'd ever heard of this Surpass software was this morning, when I was called up to a mock exam. Now we have an actual GSCE using it Friday morning?? I must admit to being a bit worried if this thing is going to work properly on the day? and if not, I will have a room full of upset students and staff? Why am I even doing this job?

Have you tried looking in c:\programData as there is sometimes a shared desktop there - if not, c:\users\default can have desktop files. In my experience on Win7, on different staff laptops; sometimes the desktop files are stored in their userprofile - other times it is stored in the desktop located in c:\programdata. Why it is different for certain staff - not sure. I told staff not to save to the desktop, but I didn't actually disallow it. So of course a lot of staff stored all of their important documents on the desktop - then, after a two week half term; the automatic profile cleanup wipes their profile and all of the data is gone. If they are using a local profile and not a roaming one, the data is irritrievable. I have had 3 staff members lose data this way and I was unable to recover it. Data recovery software recovered about 5 badly corrupted documents. Are you on a domain with a network profile? the files could be on your roaming profile on your fileserver. Now I am thinking of using Folder Redirection to redirect the desktop to their network drive, but I don't know if this is recommended or not.

yeah, get them used to living under the All Seeing AI. I remember there was this new school filtering product that analysed each users screens in realtime, and if it detected an unusual amount of skintoned pixels (with darker circles being nipples) it would take a screenshot and flag it up as potential pornography. But any news on software like this seems to have died a death; probably it is actually much harder to get stuff like this right. In my old callcentre job everything was strictly regimented based on when you signed into your phone; once I signed out for a toilet break (max 10 minutes at a time, at most 15 minutes in a day) - I was 10 minutes 40 seconds and was pulled up to the Head Desk to explain myself. I resigned shortly after. But the ones who implement policies like this are always somehow excempt from them.

Yeah we use Veeam too, ours isn't set up in the way I would like it though - ours is hosted on the same SAN as our normal data, and on the same Vhost cluster; ideally I'd rather have Veeam set up on a separate physical server because if we lose our SAN or Vhosts we would need to set up and install a new Veeam instance to do any recovery. It has worked well for doing instant VM recovery when our printserver died though. within 5 minutes a backed up server is up and running

lol, nice. Problem is only one failure can infect a network if there are e.g. SMB vulnerabilities still open. We had Emotet that was not picked up by Sophos, and SCCM Endpoint only picked up 50%. I ended up just outright blocking all mails from Russia, Vietnam, Africa etc. I have trained staff NEVER to open any e-mail that asks for macros, credentials, etc; saying it will be 100% malware no exceptions. Then the LEA sends out a stats spreadsheet that requires clicking on an e-mail link, entering credentials, and enabling edit mode / turning macro security to low. The same thing from one of the schools partners. So they don't know what to think. Sometimes they shouldn't follow links from e-mails, then other times they should; it is no wonder they get caught up.

lol really, I can't stand doing it myself. You mean you like going up into the ceiling spaces and getting covered in all that nasty stuff they have up there? It's a chore to me, running the Ethernet, putting the trunking on the wall, terminating the end pieces man what a palaver :-)

yeah sadly I think they would distract me at night, especially if I was driving in the dark when I am more likely to be tired. Especially if I am focusing on "what, is that a face??" instead of focusing on "looks like there is something in the road, the guy in front might brake hard" What they should really do like you said is stop these new cars having irritatingly bright lights that there really is no need for. When you can't tell if someone has their fullbeams on, or just have these silly ultrabright LED lights, it has gone too far.

Yeah, we are on some rotating outgoing e-mail, so our outgoing e-mails can be from about 4 different IP addresses. Every single one of them is on a blacklist. I did check our queues and our server is secure; plus we ran our mailserver on our old IP address for years with no problem at all. I ended up doing as you suggested and using Microsoft's Office 365 mail protection; all our outgoing mail is routed through them via a send connector and it all works 100% now. It proves it wasn't our mailserver the whole time... I had spent probably 25 hours in total wasting my time rewriting SPF records, sending e-mails, explaining to staff what the delivery failure notification meant... plus all the problems to the school having important e-mails about upcoming events not getting out These new IP addresses were having mail rejected from Day 1. The Police, Fire Service and NHS (infact anything public sector) all apparently use this PBSA as their ISP now, so it does make me wonder just how many of these Public Sector bodies are having e-mails denied so that members of the public think they are being ignored! We were sold this thing as "it'll be a lot easier for you to manage, any problems we will fix them straight away, you will keep your old IP addresses and configuration" - if it was free I wouldn't be so bitter but we had to pay even more than we currently paid for our link and filtering solution (plus our filtering solution had A/V and antispam bundled in). We had no communication from PBSA, it has to go through our LEA so it becomes a nightmare. The link itself and smoothwall etc - got no problems with it in and of itself, it works well. Just wish the communication was a lot better. they did nothing to find out what our requirements were. Infact I remember our LEA basically told us we had to get this new link - we were threatened "unless you get this new filter and pay for it £6 per user per 3 years, you will breach GDPR, human rights act, and your school will be liable for £100,000 fines plus you personally will be liable for penalties" - so of course there is no way our SMT will decline that. Anyone noticed that? firms threatening schools with scary fines to get cash? Kyocera threatened us with massive GDPR fines when we returned their leased printers - they said unless we pay £1000 per unit for a "memory wipe", they would not clear the RAM/HDDs of the units so when they are issued to other sites, there is a chance our school data would be on them so we'd breach GDPR - and even if I manually factory reset the units the data would still be there - I told them I'd never buy another Kyocera unit ever again... (but that is a rant for another section)

Hi I am not sure how many of you will be familiar with PBSA, it is a public sector broadband aggregate - I am not sure if this is a Wales only thing so apologies. Basically we were forced to move from our existing Radio link, to a new PBSA organised fibre link to our LEA. Instead of running our own web filter we are now using Smoothwall. We were assured that we would keep our existing IP addresses as I warned in no uncertain terms, if this changed then our services would break. (stupid me for not getting this in writing...) Well the switchover happened on Monday, it all went fine but we had different IP addresses so our Exchange Server and DirectAccess did not work. They have now changed the routing so that external --> internally, our IP addresses are back to normal (i.e. sending an e-mail to our domain works again). However, when we send an e-mail from our mailserver, it is sent outbound on a PBSA IP address beginning with 159 instead of our usual 194. I've changed our SPF records etc - but the problem is this IP address seems to be shared and it is on multiple blacklists! So over half of our e-mails are now being rejected, which is making Senior Management sad :-( The LEA have basically said it is our problem now, first they said it was because our server supported out of date SSL (so scored an F on SSLlabs - now fixed, but not sure how that would relate...) - now they are saying we will have to ring every single host that our mail is being rejected by and request delisting! The problem is that this IP address appears to be a shared one so as soon as it is delisted, it will end up relisted just as quickly! Does anyone have any experience with this? We were debating moving to the Cloud for our school e-mails this summer, I was against the idea but now I am thinking we should just do it. Ditch this exchange and just be done with it. None of the other schools in our LEA area have had this problem as they are all cloud hosted.

Played a great flying game called Ultrawings - when I first saw the graphics I thought it was a load of dung, but after playing it on PS VR it really captures the sensation of flight; as your eyes focus as if you are really up there in the sky. Made me consider getting VR; normally I am an FPS guy but FPS games IMO are boring in VR, they have very slow movement (or that teleporting rubbish) - flying is where it is at (either fixed wing or rotor/hovercraft) - or driving games. I just wish the VR resolution was a lot higher as it is very burry. Why is VR resolution so low?

yeah the sky in Wales was full of thick gray clouds, still is

Just seen this terrible article on Wales Online, just up the road from me https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/school-worker-sadomasochistic-sexual-relationship-15531125 He forcibly abused this girl and also tried to get her to do bondage, clearly a sexually warped man. just goes to show how easily it can be done... he only got busted because he went on a school trip, and with the little privacy they had the girls friends sussed him out. Even after the police interviewed him he still carried on with this girl. Last year a Newport assistant head got jailed for putting a hidden camera in the boys changing rooms (this camera was really good, it was in the shape of a phillips screw head, it would have fooled even me)

I work alone and I do kind of miss being able to chat to people about IT, in my old callcentre job I had a group of friends and we'd talk about the job, new IT developments, etc. Now I am alone in my own office, which is good in a way but here I can't talk to anyone about IT as nobody has a clue what I am talking about.

wow we have a catering PC that runs the canteen cashless catering system. I hope our school don't pay for it (no idea if they do or don't) because every time the damn thing goes wrong the canteen staff are straight on the phone to me, and I have to go down and sort it out (often via trial and error)

We have a lady coming round tomorrow at 2pm about the pisa tests. I said I would rather have had pizza than this pisa and they did not find it amusing. I hope she doesn't want to run the diagnostic test on every workstation, because I finish at 3pm so that means we will get at most 3 workstations finished - or I'll be working until midnight. The tests are then ran for real on Mon-Tues. I recieved information from another user that it did not go so well; and we all know when there are technical problems that keep students waiting, the classrooms often become a bacchanalia. I don't understand what appears to have gone wrong; I wasn't involved in the tests when we ran them about 5 years ago but our data manager (who unfortunately has quit otherwise it would be his problem) said they worked well; the diagnostic USB they shipped us loaded and ran sucesfully on every single workstation in under 5 minutes. Have they outsourced their development to India this time and ended up in a simular situation to RM? I was wondering if anyone else has run these tests sucessfully?

The teachers teach a "layer above" the devices. e.g. Students can you research the definitive history of pockets. They don't teach "can you go onto your home screen, then go into Chrome (or Safari if on IOS), then go into the Options menu on the top right (drag down on older devices)...." Any real work that needs to be done will be done in a computer room. This is in a secondary school, it might be different in a primary school where young children may not know how to use specific devices. But then children that young might be better off doing things on paper until they are older? We'd love to have the money to get 1:1 Ipaps but in my area only the school that the LEA bosses children go to can afford 1:1 Ipads.

We couldn't afford it, we just opened up BYOD instead. For what an Ipad can be used for, a phone can pretty much do the same thing. For any real work there are still desktop computers.

I'm not a doctor but my personal experience with Tramadol is that it can make you a bit faint and lightheaded when you stand up, it also made me nauseated if I took it early in the morning. But after a few days you do get used to the side effects. for me the 30/500 co-codamols worked a lot better than the tramadol with a lot less side effects, but this was for a broken arm so it was probably a lot less painful anyway as it isn't the body core. I once cracked or damaged my rib and the Tramadol didn't really touch the pain :-( both can cause bad constipation which is not ideal if you suspect a hernia

i always found the rewards system a bit strange too; are they punishing students for being unfortunate enough to become unwell by not giving them these rewards? or are they trying to encourage students to come into school while unwell, to claim this reward, at the risk of spreading disease? or are they suggesting that students fraudulently pull "sickies" to stay off school and that giving rewards will reduce this? if a kid is ill or doesn't want to come to school i don't think a £5 gift voucher will change that myself personally. we used to have rewards in my old school for the form with the best attendance and it was universally ignored.

I wonder if the boy has autism issues; you could see his bedroom door had "Protected by suchandsuch Security" stickers on it, I wonder if he is obsessed with security or the popos. He's been done for this three times apparently. He should consider himself lucky he isn't being sought out for extradition to the USA for tampering with their flights as I don't think a boy like that would do terribly well in an American penitentiary even if he does get PC'd up. If I was in his shoes I'd be even more worried about the ass whoopin' I'd get from my parents Never had any bomb threats here luckily. Any student could easily send an anonymous bomb threat and get away with it if they wanted to.

Hi no we are not using DRS on our cluster; we have tried migrating the host to a different physical but we haven't tried migrating it to a different datastore yet. It migrates across hosts fine (i.e. doesn't take ages), but the server itself still boots slowly/doesn't work regardless of what host it is on even if it is alone on a host. I wasn't sure if it was a VMWare issue or if it was a Windows issue a "layer" up. Checking the performance figures for the server in VMware, the CPU usage, Mem usage, Network, Disk Latency etc all flatlines almost as if the server is off; it is barely above 0. once I have rejoined it to the domain it returns to normal. We have two DC's and they seem to serve other stations fine during this. I have just fixed our SCCM server by rejoining it to the domain but part of me thinks I should have left it as it was for further testing as it doesn't matter so much if it is down (as opposed to the mail or print servers) I have just found the VMWare Communities so I am having a trawl through there to see if anyone else has reported this. but yeah i am going to see if they can spring for a UPS. I think the school will argue the LEA should pay for it and the LEA will argue the school should pay for it... it doesn't help that they put 15 or so PoE capable switches on one 15a ring, so every time the power goes down I have to come in to unplug them and manually reset the fusebox switch...

Hi I think I may have posted this before but I cannot find it, so apologies. I keep having random problems where some of our Windows Server 2012 R2 instances will randomly "grind to a halt". (more below) This has happened to one of our print servers, to our exchange server, to our SCCM server etc. It seems to happen once every 6 months or so. We are on a Server 2012 R2 forest (not server 2012 functional level though as we have 2008 legacy servers), hosted on VSphere 5.5 on 3 physical hosts. Other servers on the same physical host remain working. It seems to happen after we have physical layer issues - our LEA ran switches are not on a UPS so the network goes down if we have a power failure. Basically what happens - the affected server will take hours (12+) to boot up. Different servers seem to get stuck on different sections, but the last one was stuck on a Group Policy section. It will get stuck for hours but will eventually progress to the logon screen. When it hits the login screen however, half of the services have not started - e.g. you can not browse to the servers fileshares; nor connect remotely to Services as the RPC server has not started. You can log in as an Administrator but it will take hours (again, 12+) to reach the desktop. Once in, the machine will be very unresponsive e.g. the UI will not load various sections such as System. If you disable the NIC, it will boot up and log in very quickly as expected; but the services still will not start / stop properly. trying to stop a service will just hang services.msc at 100% core usage. Doing a group policy model shows nothing unusual as there will be another server with the same policy working fine. You can connect to the event viewer but there is nothing in any of the logs that shows any errors; it is as if the server is working fine just extremely slowly. e.g. the latest error for hours will be that the login provider is taking a while (134524 seconds). and in system all you will see is random services starting/stopping. If I restore the server from a Veeam backup, it wil work fine for a number of days and then it will display the exact same problem again. The only way to fix it, is to boot the server up in Safe Mode with Networking; disjoin it from the domain; reboot it again in safe mode with networking and rejoin it to the domain with the same name. Then the server will work fine as if nothing had happened. This isn't just a Server 2012 R2 issue as our Exchange server suffered exactly the same thing, running Server 2008. Anyone else seen anything like this? It is very hard to search for unfortunately as there are no error codes and Windows Server can run slowly for many, many different reasons so finding out what causes this is a needle in a haystack :-( I mean generally it is not considered a good idea to rely on Microsoft software for anything important so at the moment I am planning around it but if this happens to our primary domain controller I am not quite sure what I'll do. Thanks